Campus Tours
Contents
Mission
Our committee is exploring ways to incorporate growing knowledge about, acknowledgment of, and responses to the University of Delaware’s role in perpetuating disenfranchisement (legacies of dispossession, enslavement, segregation, and white privilege) through campus interpretation broadly defined. That includes developing language for campus tours given by Blue Hen ambassadors, co-creating campus tours or virtual tours available through the UD website based on race and ethnicity, public-facing exhibits/websites focused on UD’s history and the histories of Newark, creative writing and storytelling in collaboration with student theatre groups or classes in live performances and/or virtual interactive maps/tours.
Goals
- Explore how UD’s complex history is currently being interpreted in relation to its status as a land-grant institution situated on historic Lenape land in a city where people were enslaved and in a state that codified racial segregation in higher education.
- Identify stakeholders at the University and affiliated programs (including the WPAMC) and formulate a plan for communication and collaboration.
- Connect to UD Archives to gather campus specific-context (building names, first BIPOC UD students, first Registered Student Organizations, campus developments and land space, major events and celebrations) – acknowledging UD’s racist past and present.
- Interface with the UD Task Force on Building Names.
- Develop collaborative ventures with Creative Writing, student theater groups, and Theatre classes to write and to perform stories that engage with UD’s histories.
- Think about community partners and possibilities for outreach with Newark History Center and DE Historical Society.
- Undertake comparative study of how other institutions in the mid-Atlantic region are interpreting their problematic histories and furthering current antiracist agendas.
Members
Chair: Jennifer Van Horn (Art History and History)
- Kathryn Benjamin-Golden (Africana Studies)
- Stephanie Chang (Diversity & Inclusion Student Life)
- Kenneth Cohen (History and Museum Studies)
- Sarah Dobe-Hund (Honors College)
- Adam Foley (Equity & Inclusion)
- Cole Galloway (Physical Therapy)
- Kelly O’Rourke (Theatre, Resident Ensemble Players)
Black Histories at University of Delaware: An Interactive UDARI StoryMap
The Campus Tours Committee is excited to announce the launch of our major project, Black
Histories at University of Delaware: An Interactive UDARI StoryMap.
Engage with this student-authored digital public history project to learn more about African
American experiences’ vital to UD’s history, from struggles of disenfranchisement and
unfreedom, to racial justice activism and protest, to Black excellence and achievement. We invite
you to share your responses, to teach with the StoryMap, and to circulate it widely
The StoryMap connects previously under-studied histories, now coming to light thanks to
ongoing work by UDARI researchers and community partners, to specific sites on UD’s Newark
campus and the city of Newark. A dynamic resource to which future researchers can add, the
StoryMap can continue to accrue layers of history and be updated with new findings. It is the
work of past UDARI interns Alenoush Davis, Tara Lennon, and Elisa Davila, with the assistance
of members of UDARI’s Campus Tours Committee, Legacies of Enslavement and Dispossession
at UD committee, UDARI advisor Alison Parker, and UD Library Digital Scholarship Librarian
Kayla Abner.
This digital project is a first step in realigning campus histories to honor important Black stories
while acknowledging the ways that the University of Delaware has benefitted historically from
unfreedom and perpetuated racism. The Campus Tours committee continues to work toward
commemorating Black histories at the University of Delaware more widely and in more
permanent and visible ways.